Hello, I'm Kresti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a soldier. He enlisted in the army to escape from a life that seemed to offer little but

unemployment and possibly petty crime. At the age of 21 he went to war and on the 8th of June

1982 in Bluff Cove on the Falkland Islands his ship was bombed.

Most of his friends died.

He lived but was terribly disfigured.

His resilience and humour have since made him a celebrity carrying him through a

series of television documentaries and autobiography and these days is the host of a

local radio program. He's got married and he's been awarded an OBE for his charity work.

People call him a hero, but he dismisses this.

I'm an ordinary person, he says, who was a little less fortunate than others but luckier than most.

He is Simon Weston.

You've lived Simon with your disfigurement for what 14 years now.

Does that mean you're used to it or do you still look in the mirror and think I wish it wasn't there?

I think you tolerate it. I don't think you ever totally get used to it because it's not the

person you wanted to be but it's the person I am so I suppose I live with it and just accept it to a to a degree

but you get used to people staring at you do they still stare?

I suspect they do I don't really notice to be honest and initially when it

happened I thought that you know I didn't know whether they were staring at the injuries or the person they'd seen on TV or in the press.

We were walking through Liverpool not so long ago and my wife and myself, she overheard young lads say to his mate he said

oh look there's that that fella from the Falklands you know that that fellow was his

...